The L Shaped Room (1962)

May 28, 1963

Screen: 'L-Shaped Room':Leslie Caron Grows Up in Harsh Story

By BOSLEY CROWTHER

Published: May 28, 1963

THE little Leslie Caron of "Lili" and "Gigi," who passed from the dew-dappled stage with her more mature offering of "Fanny," now comes to full professional age. She gives a stunning, mature performance in the British-made film "The L-Shaped Room."

The picture opened last night at the Fine Arts Theater.

Miss Caron plays a French miss in London who, while carrying an illegitimate child, falls in love with a struggling young writer and has a torturing affair with him. The actress pours into this role so much powerful feeling, so much heart and understanding, that she imbues a basically threadbare little story with tremendous compassion and charm.

The credit, however, is not all Miss Caron's. She must share it with an excellent cast, including Tom Bell, a new actor who plays the writer on a par with her. Particularly she must share it with the remarkable young director Bryan Forbes, who also wrote the screenplay from a novel by Lynne Reid Banks.

Mr. Forbes is a sometime actor whose first directorial job was last year's beautiful and sensitive "Whistle Down the Wind." In this little picture he has achieved much the same human quality, with shadings of spiritual devotion, as in that.

Although his story is different — more sordid and harsh, in many ways, turning on an illicit pregnancy — the characters have a familiar simplicity and sincerity. The birth of the baby on Christmas implies a silent spiritual link.

In contrast with many of the tough films coming from Britain these days, this one has, too, a chin-up tolerance of the Establishment AND the Kitchen Sink.

It takes place, for the most part, in a cheap rooming house in Notting Hill, on the top floor of which the expectant mother has her pitifully shabby L-shaped room. But it doesn't go in for kicking and snarling against The Misery of It All or The Powers That Be. It accepts the bedbugs and the social station. Its concern, is the status of the heart.

This is effectively developed. The young woman, knowing her state and having gone through the agonizing experience of contemplating abortion, decides to have the child. Reluctantly she comes to love the young man and gives herself to him. She is racked by anguish and confusion when he finds out what she hasn't dared to tell.

It is a most reasonable relation that Mr. Forbes has exquisitely wrought out of the tangle of tortured feelings—the young woman knowing only love, the young man knowing disillusion, resentment and jealousy. And he has drawn from his two leading actors scenes that throb with the passion and tension of two desperately interlocked beings.

But around his principal players Mr. Forbes has placed an appropriate mobile frieze of colorful rooming-house characters to reflect the pulsations of their hearts. He casts Brock Peters as a gentle Negro jazz musician who occupies an adjoining room and finds his feelings of friendship toward the two rather shockingly torn.

Avis Bunnage is the sleazy landlady with a heart of lead, and Cicely Courtneidge is a faded vaudeville actress who lives with her cat on the ground floor. And Mr. Forbes has Emlyn Williams as an unctuous illegal practitioner, Patricia Phoenix as a rooming-house harlot and Bernard Lee as her customer.

Against the background of these people, Miss Caron brings to life a radiant being, full of bravery and inspiration. And the final episode in the film puts a perfect punctuation to her clear glow.